THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE PT. 4

In the comments-section to FEELINGS, NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS, poster Marionette said in part:

At one point I was keeping a tally of how many rapes occurred in comics (largely for this purpose) a month. I stopped because the whole thing just made me feel ill after a while.

Since Marionette didn't provide a list, I have to wonder at her criteria for this statement. Was she including attempted rapes that are prevented by timely intrusions? I mentioned this sort of crime in this essay, noting that it was the same trope whether the (usually female) victim was rescued by a male or by a female hero. I wouldn't say that attempted rapes should be deemed the same as accomplished rapes, though it's true that a given attempt may be as sensationalized as a completed act.

It's possible that sexual threat may be counted as well.  I have no doubts that even powerful female superheroes probably get sexually threatened by villains much more than male superheroes are. But that too would not be actual rape.

The only other possibility that I can countenance-- speaking as a comics-fan who no longer reads a lot of current comics-- is that some of the "rapes" included may be incidents in which a female victim gets beaten up and/or killed. I'm not imputing any of these beliefs to the poster Marionette, but of all those described, the last position has become the most popular in fannish circles, as evidenced by Gail Simone's notorious WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS list.

In this essay I've stated that there are two forms in which fictional sexuality does or does not have a significant violent component, and two in which fictional violence does or does not have a significant sexual component.  So I've obviously no problem in saying that *sometimes* a violent act is not just a violent act.

A problematic aspect of the Simone list and similar fulminations, though, is that such imputations start and end with the observation that a lot of female characters get beaten up by male ones. But if any popular medium is notable for its preponderance of Equal Opportunity Assaults, it ought to be comic books.  This is not to say that I think "man beaten by woman= rape" any more than I do when you reverse the genders. But often comics-fans are a little too quick to condemn in the male what they ignore in the female.

For instance, it's become a popular fan-trope to laugh and/or sneer at comic-book covers in which a heroine like Lois Lane or Wonder Woman is made the target of assaults that may or may not look like Freudian displacement.

Here's one famous "spread-eagled" cover:

And here's one that's a little more convincing in the Freud department:

But if we're going to say that any projectile is a penis, what should one make of this GREEN LANTERN cover?

Here Star Sapphire is not only jabbing the hero in the chest with a lance-like lightning bolt, she's even smiling while she does it.

So, by the logic that all assaults equal rape, is she raping him?

And what should one make of this famous, admittedly comical scene of Feminine Rapine?

I should perhaps underline the point I've been hammering away at so long. Assuming that everyone could somehow come to total agreement as to what constitutes fictional rape, it doesn't really matter whether there are more male-female rapes in comics, or female-male, or any other permutation of which one may conceive.

What matters is that a great part of fiction's appeal is its ability to conjure forth fantasies of supremacy, with or without sexual content. By doing so fiction mirrors that portion of human nature that I will again term *megalothymia.*

This portion may be, as Jung once suggested, a part of an indelible shadow within us. But even if this is the only way to characterize this part of human nature, Jung repeatedly calls on human beings to acknowledge and understand that nature, rather than attempting to bury it beneath fatuous appeals to goodness-- or, even worse--

Political correctness.

BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW PT. 2

At the end of Part 1 I used a couple of Image "bad girls" as counter-examples to an essay by Noah Berlatsky:

The objection may be raised that RIPTIDE et al are intended to function in roughly the same way as any DC serial superhero character: that they have serial continuities that suggest that the characters have a consistent life outside the boundaries of the panels. But this would be a fallacious defense, for in practice there's no more grounding of the internality of the "Image bad girls" than there is of the "Jack Cole hotties." So the logical extension of Berlatsky's position is that "Image bad girls" too should be exempt from any expectations of verisimilitude, because "visual stimulation" is their raison d'etre, not building up a coherent sense of their characters as heroic, principled adventurers.

To clarify, I don't downgrade either the "Image bad girls" or the "Jack Cole hotties" because they are, in Berlatsky's words, "simply about visual stimulation."  Given that I view all literary constructs as "gestures" in the sense defined by Susanne Langer, it's the nature of all such constructs to be more unreal than real.  Their relationship to reality, then, is always more a matter of common cultural consent than of any objective measure of realism.

As much as Berlatsky, I have my own likes and dislikes with respect to the way this or that character's verisimilitude is portrayed, and I have my own dislike for seeing characters I've liked or appreciated portrayed as (say) "space-tarts."  But I also recognize that individual taste, rather than critical logic, often (though not always) governs the degree to which readers accept or reject a given character's portrayal.

For instance, Berlatsky considers it "insulting"-- though it's not clear who or what's being insulted-- that a "smart, motivated, principled, adventurer" should be depicted as having "an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack."  So in this particular case, Berlatsky wishes to see an agreement between the internal characterization of the "adventurer" in question and her choices in personal attire.  In the previous essay I deemed this to be a concern for "verisimilitude" over any sensationalistic elements of a given story in the genre under discussion.

And yet, in 2009's COMICS IN THE CLOSET, Berlatsky shows this panel from an early BATMAN comic, described as "a picture of Batman acting in typical manly fashion."

Does Berlatsky regard Batman's act as that of a "heroic, principled adventurer?"  On the contrary, here it's not verisimilitude that concerns Berlatsky, but its polar opposite (at least as described in the first part of this essay), a particular spectrum of sensations encoded by Batman's actions in the comic-book diegesis.


"So masculinity in super-hero comics is almost laughably straightforward. And yet, at the same time, it isn’t straight at all. Instead, it’s bifurcated, incoherent and, in a lot of ways, really gay. To begin with, super-heroes generally have a secret life, a “secret identity”, that they can’t talk about even to their closest friends and relations. In other words, they are all closeted. And what’s in that closet?. A hypermasculine, muscle-bound body, swathed in day-glo tights; an uber-manly man whose physical tussles with the bad guys preclude any meaningful relationship with the leading lady. Out of costume, on the other hand, the hero is a feminized sissy-boy, whose painful secret prevents him from having any meaningful relationship with the leading lady. Either way, what looked like iconic maleness starts to look, from up close, rather queer. And that’s not even getting into the whole boy sidekick thing."


So when Star Sapphire dresses up like a space-tart, that's an offense against her qualities of heroic (or even villainous) internality. However, Batman's apparent claim to heroism is automatically nugatory, and his appearance, despite a lack of overt sexualization, is nevertheless indicative of hypermasculine defensiveness, whose main purpose is to deflect any appearance of gayness.   I'd like to cut Berlatsky a break by claiming that these contradictions arise purely from personal taste.  However, it's more likely that the discontinuity arises from the type of adversarial criticism Berlatsky practices-- which I'll address in a future essay, though not necessarily one directed at Berlatsky.

DUCK SHOOT AT THE ANTI-EMBODIMENT CORRAL, PART 2

At the end of FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 3 I said:

...though I have just two more Thompson-related essays to get out of the way, I may have come across another resource that supplies me with more debate-worthy fodder.

The "resource" to which I alluded was this 2-26-12 essay on Hooded Utilitarian, where Noah Berlatsky takes issue with several current offerings of comic-book superhero cheesecake, comparing all of them unfavorably with the cheesecake offerings from such bygone artists as Jack Cole and Dan DeCarlo, as well as current artist Larry Elmore.  Though Berlatsky does give a nod of approval to Frank Miller's sexed-up version of Catwoman, most of his superhero-comics examples he regards as "moronic."

I don't agree that current superhero comics are quite as bereft of what he calls "feministploitation," where:

the fetish clothing and the putative power of the character are coherently working together, both in that the power makes the character more sexy and in that that the clothing adds (not necessarily logically, but still) to the sense of the character’s potency.

However, I will agree that the particular examples Berlatsky chose are indeed incompetent exemplars of current hyper-sexualization.  To take just one example, he notes that "Star Sapphire’s costume, for example, goes right past sexy and on into ludicrous," and I can hardly demur:

I mentioned in Part 1 that in real life women often had to dress in social situations to show themselves off to good effect without showing too much and looking like sluts.  Apparently this version of Star Sapphire took her social cues down at the Boom-Boom Room.

That said, I find some problems with Berlatsky's justifications:

I think there are a couple of reasons. In the first place, super-heroines are, you know, heroes. They’re supposed to have stuff to do, crime to fight, justice to uphold, and so forth. For Dan DeCarlo and Jack Cole, the woman are just there to stare at; they’re hot, hot hot. That’s the whole raison d’etre; there’s no effort to pretend that you care what these women think, or how they act, or whether they defeat the villain without falling out of their tops and being exposed to the vastness of space.

And shortly afterward:

If you make it simply about visual stimulation, it’s simply about visual stimulation, and doesn’t have to have anything to do (or at least, not much to do) with real women. Once you start pretending that you’re talking about a smart, motivated, principled adventurer, on the other hand, you end up implying that said smart, motivated, principled, adventurer has an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack. Which is, it seems to me, insulting.

Though I would agree that all of Berlatsky's chosen examples are indeed bad, I don't quite agree with the idea that a given heroine cannot be a "motivated, principled adventurer" and still wear something a little on the sassy side, as per the "belly shirt Supergirl" that I've defended earlier:

The above drawing is certainly a little on the cheesecakey side-- what I've termed the "TITILLATION" category elsewhere-- but is there anything about it that makes the character look unprincipled or stupid because she's chosen to show a little flesh?  I would say no, though I have the impression that a lot of fans protested "sexy Supergirl" to the extent that the new incarnation sports a safe generic costume with zero titillation elements.

To many fans there seems a major disconnect, similar to Kelly Thompson's false "idealization/sexualization" dichotomy, between portraying heroes as characters with high ideals and principles and as characters who look good and obviously have the power to attract many sex-partners.

Thus I'm surprised that anyone, such as the blogger for this BEAT post, would intimate that the existence of "superhero sexuality" might not even matter. Maybe I'm biased in that I didn't start collecting the genre until I was eleven (having only dallied with kid-and-teen comics prior to that), but to the best of my recollection I always thought that even the "all ages" superhero books of the Silver Age had a strong sexual vibe, even if the sexiness appeared in very simple form, as with Lois Lane or Vicky Vale trying to "unmask" Superman or Batman, and thus play Delilah to their Samson.


More later.